Hello Sam! I have been following your blog for a while. You are an extraordinary painter and colorist!

I have a little doubt and I wonder if you would be able to solve it.

I have been trying Ryan Wood's method for coloring (I believe you are too a follower of this artist) So, I start with the B/W value and then I add the color in a separate layer in "Color" or "Hard light" mode.

Although I tried it, it doesn't quite give the result I was hoping for. The color looks kinda poor.

http://cghub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2969

In this link you can see the color and the B/W version. (it's the CGHUB forum)

Nicolay: Mostly textures on top of the painting, but there's a lot of detail hand-painted in also. There's also a subtle grain effect applied after I finished, so you're right.

Spiritto: I think the grayscale-->colorize technique works best when you limit the use of atmosphere until you've already applied the colors. Part of why Ryan Wood is so good at that technique is because he is careful about his exchanges of warm and cool color when moving across forms and in the detail. If you don't do this, your colors look dead. The problem with heavy atmosphere is it complicates the colorizing process, because atmosphere modifies the warm/cool relationships, so you need to be a master to make the exchanges of color in the details work with the color changes applied with the atmosphere. So I'd recommend painting with as little atmosphere as possible in the black and white phase, then applying atmosphere in color after the colors have already been applied to the rest of the image. Does that make sense?

What I don't understand is why everybody is getting so excited about working from B/W and adding color later on, when nobody (that incl Ryan Wood) uses is correctly. Just check one thing in your artwork. Turn your colored version into B/W. Then compare it to the original grey version. They're not the same. So, if you're using this process to get the best endresult as far as value goes, you're wrong. Because the value changes after you add color...I'm sorry;)